New vote tallies expected to show Malloy won governor's race

Published 2:31 pm, Thursday, November 4, 2010

HARTFORD -- Democrat Dan Malloy defeated Republican Tom Foley in the governor's race, according to revised numbers that will be released later today by Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz's office.

New vote totals released late Thursday morning by The Associated Press gave Malloy 565,507 and Foley 559,267 votes, with 741 of 751 precincts reporting -- 99 percent of the vote.

Sources with knowledge of the totals said Thursday morning that a discrepancy in reports from AP undercounted Malloy's margin of victory in New Haven. The latest numbers from New Haven gave Malloy an overwhelming margin there, 22,298 to 3,685.

Bysiewicz, who on Wednesday said Malloy had won by about 3,100 votes, will release the updated but still unofficial results showing that Malloy's margin is above the threshold for a recount.

Bysiewicz had planned a noon news conference on Thursday. But late in the morning her staff announced that it had been postponed until "later this afternoon."

The development comes a day after widespread confusion clouded the results of the race, with both parties sparring over who had won, lawyers combing through voting tallies in Bridgeport and elsewhere, and the possibility growing by the hour that the whole thing might end up in court.

In a statement, Foley's campaign manager Justin Clark urged that Bysiewicz postpone any declaration of victory until the "results are certain.

" In the last twenty-four hours alone, Bridgeport has revised downward the number of votes cast for Dan Malloy by over 3,500. Other cities and towns are likely to revise their results in the days ahead," the statement said. "We understand that Susan Bysiewicz plans to announce this afternoon that their results of the gubernatorial election are official. We have sent the Secretary of the State's office a letter requesting that she not refer to her preliminary results of the election as "official" until the results are unlikely to be amended."

Late Wednesday, the statewide vote tally from AP had Foley in front, also with 99 percent of the vote reportedly tabulated. At that time, Foley had 552,106 votes to Malloy's 543,682, or 50-49 percent.

Bysiewicz said around noon on Wednesday that she based her declaration that Malloy won by about 3,100 votes on informal final tallies reported by registrars across the state. Absentee ballots were not included, she said, but those ballots tend to trend along the same line.

An e-mail sent by Bysiewicz's office to registrars across the state at 3:09 p.m. Wednesday, hours after her initial declaration that Malloy had won, suggests her office was still scrambling to amass final, albeit unofficial, numbers.

The e-mail, from Lesley Mara, deputy secretary of state, said: "As you know, there is much anticipation surrounding this election, in particular the close Governor's race. In order to be able to publish final numbers, we urge you to get your returns in to our office today. You can fax them to ... Ted Bromley ... Thanks for all of your hard work and for your help."

Sharon Vecchiolla, Democratic registrar of voters in Greenwich, said Thursday she received the e-mail. "Why would you do a press conference in the (early) afternoon to announce that a candidate has won if you don't have all of your official results?" she asked. "I just think it was a little early. I probably would have waited. I just think it was a little bit premature. Why do you want to put the horse before the cart?"

Foley, who said Wednesday he thought he was ahead by 2,000 votes, had expressed frustration that his staff was unable to analyze town-by-town results from the state. Bysiewicz's staff said Wednesday that the numbers would be released late in the day and then delayed that until Thursday.

In Bridgeport, for much of Wednesday Trumbull First Selectman Timothy Herbst and a battery of lawyers met with Bridgeport's outgoing Republican Registrar of Voters Joseph Borges to explore if there were voting irregularities to form the basis of a lawsuit.

"I can't believe what I'm seeing," Herbst, who is working for the Foley campaign, said Wednesday night. "It's nearly 24 hours after the polls close and we still can't get a number of the votes cast compared against the number of voters checked off on the tally sheets."

Sources said Kevin O'Connor, Connecticut's former U.S. attorney now working as a lawyer with a firm run by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, has been contacted to look into the allegations, some of which include absentee ballot application irregularities; whether voters were allowed to cast ballots at polls where they are not registered; and whether ballots were cast by people whose names were not properly checked off.

Healy on Oct. 20 filed a complaint alleging that two individuals obtained and distributed more than 250 applications for absentee ballots listing a vacant lot on North Avenue as their address.

Foley's team apparently is examining vote tallies in other towns as well. A representative from his campaign was in the Fairfield Town Clerk's office Thursday morning going over the election numbers with Town Clerk Betsy Browne and her assistant.

Democrats believe the Republican are engaged in a fishing expedition, hoping to turn up a few insignificant problems and cast them as evidence of fraud. "Our system didn't work right but did correct itself," said Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch. "The integrity of this election is as strong as any election."

Results in Bridgeport had been delayed when a judge ordered a two-hour extension of voting at about a dozen sites because of the shortage of machine-scored paper ballots.

Almost all of the city's 25 precincts came up short of ballots, many by mid-afternoon, causing long lines of disgruntled voters waiting to cast their ballots.

When workers started photocopying unused ballots to deal with the shortage, Republican poll watchers objected. Those ballots could not be scanned into machines, necessitating the hand-counting that went on all night and into Wednesday in the Bridgeport registrar's office in McLevy Hall.